If you need another perspective on why active user count is so important to business, watch the Silicon Valley episode "Daily Active Users".
It basically narrates that download counters are useless, you can have 3.000.000 downloads but as low as 50.000 active users, which is a disaster.
With 3M downloads... sure, you can fool a couple investors here and there with that number, but actually savvy ones will care about active users and tell you off. What's more, they can then go an tell other investors "Vivaldi is hiding their real user count", which then would be even more of a disaster for a lot of reasons.
I know it's kind of a tricky scenario, but if you use your head and think about it logically, a daily/weekly, 99% anonymous phone home in exchange for a power user browser is a deal so good it would be stupid not to take it.
Alternatively, if Vivaldi would cost 20-30 dollars, I would switch to Firefox this exact second. Why? Because 20 dollars is a lot of money here, and I can assure you that it's also a lot in half of the world's countries, so they would lose about 70-80% of the current userbase for little gain.
So again, a phone home is an insignificant price to pay, and the alternative is basically, not have a browser.
All this said, the only way that Vivaldi could actually remove the phone home, is to make the usercount so huge it would be irrelevant for investors. So yeah, keep telling your friends and family about Vivaldi! We all benefit from it.
